Thursday, August 20, 2009

Teacher Burn Out On The First Day Of School



Today was Joe's first day in high school and my first day as a computer teacher.

Joe had a great day as a new sophomore. He loved all of his classes and is looking forward to tomorrow.

This is my 22nd year of teaching. I don't remember ever being so tired after the first day of school as I was today. My exhaustion might have something to do with the 42 -35 students rotating into my classroom every 40 minutes. Not only do I have huge class sizes, I only have 28 computers. It was kind of a "Welcome to Hell, Mrs. Caringella, these are your classes" sort of day.

I believe in starting my classes out with a lot of structure. As I firmly positioned my witch's hat on my head, I went over the rules of the computer lab. I had taken a few power point classes over the summer, so I proudly presented my rules and goals using my newly acquired skills. I can tell that I will have a few students who will try to push me, one of which found himself in time out before we had even started talking about consequences. A few others found themselves moved away from their friends pretty fast.

When I came home and tried to review a few websites, that I wanted to show the students tomorrow, I found myself falling asleep.

I hope that tomorrow will be better, maybe 50 percent of the students will be sick. If that were to happen at least the other students could work on a computer by themselves.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

how can you teach kids about computers if the kids don't have there own? are they going to just buddy up? I'm sorry your first day wasn't very good. I hope the school year is better.

Bonnie said...

I bet the last tech teacher left that spot because she got tired of feeding 40 kids with 28 plates at the all-u-can eat buffet.